]]>It’s that life-defining moment when a character on screen transforms totally into a real-life personality. We’ve seen Seema Biswas, Ben Kingsley and Farhan Akhtar metamorphose into real-life characters in front of our bewildered eyes.

Now it is Priyanka Chopra. She virtually transforms her physicality before entering the spirit and the soul of boxing champ Mary Kom.
And what a grand entry!

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Priyanka Chopra as the gritting volatile boxer from Manipur who won’t take no for an answer, even from God. Penetrating a male domain like boxing in a gender-defying swoop, Pryinka’s MC takes us on a voyage of self-discovery where a plucky poor girl from rural Manipur goes right to the Olympics. It’s an incredible story filled with sound and fury signifying something deep and seductive, just waiting to be told.

Hats off to debutant director Omang Kumar for bringing us one of the most inspiring bio-pics to have ever reached the silver screen.

“Mujhe bronze pasand nahin aata,” barks MC’s coach(played by the well-cast Sunil Thapa). As we see Mary’s dreams come true in front of our eyes we know she was born to ‘wing’.The narrative has a soaring quality and texture. It simply takes off with scarcely any room for breathing space . The breathless quality of storytelling goes well with the protagonist’s stormy mercurial nature.As Mary’s story unravels in a flashback we meet a woman who is so not affected by gender rules and discrimination that governs our society.

Very early in the tighly clenched narrative we see Mary get into a full-fledged scuffle with a school bully.Later she takes on another far more dangerous bully who threatens to destroy her boxing career. In and out of the arena Mary never stops fighting.

“The rest of the world may be round. But your world is this square ring,” her coach reminds her pointing to the boxing arena. The struggle, as depicted in the stunning unspoilt North-Eastern terrain of Manipur, captured with mesmeric intensity by cinematographer Keiko Nakahara, is manifold. Here it is a curse to be born a girl.And to be born a girl who wants to be a boxing champ???!!!

You have to be kidding.

Admirably the narrative doesn’t over-sentimentalize Mary’s struggle. This is Mother India without the glycerine and melodrama.As played by Priyanka, Mary is both gritty and giggly, plucky and precocious, a ferocious fighter and a tender mother. Priyanka expresses every shade of her character with a pitch-perfect bravado. Her North Eastern accent could easily have become caricatural. The actress controls curbs and quantifies every component of her character’s personality without losing that basic element of spontaneity without which Mary would have become mechanical.

I dare any other actress to play Mary Kom the way Priyanka has. Even Hilary Swank would have been stumped by Mary’s mystical mix of the girlish and the aggressive. Priyanka gets the the point.

My favourite sequences are the ones where Mary shares tender marital moments with her husband. If it’s vital for a career woman to get a supportive husband it is equally essential for a film starring a female hero to have a co-actor who can play yin to her yang. Newcomer Darshan Kumar suffuses the screen with such supreme spousal sensitivity. He is a talent to watch.
Predictably enough a lot of the opposition to Mary’s dreams is shown to come from within her home. The skirmishes between Mary and her father(Robin Das) and Mary’s gender battle with the slimy executive of the boxing federation(played with diabolic relish by Shakti Singh) are exceptionally ‘filmy’,and I use that word in the truest cinematic sense. The picturesque narrative , the richly flavoured music composed by Shashi Suman and Shivum(watch out for the poignant lullaby sung by Priyanka Chopra), the rapid-fire editing, the framing of the shimmering shots and the incredibly aesthetic use of rich colours bear the unmistakable stamp of producer Sanjay Leela Bhansali who is billed as ‘Creative Director.’

Mary Kom is a motivational masterpiece. From first frame to last it grips your senses and irrigates the parched corridors of your heart like very few bio-pics in recent times. Debutant director Omang Kumar weaves seamlessly in and out of Ms Kom’s remarkable life creating a work that is as dramatic as Mehboob’s Mother India and as inspiring as Attenborough’s Gandhi.
Priyanka Chopra’s powerhouse performance knocks the breath out of our solar plexus .She yet again proves herself the best actress of her generation.

Hereafter there will be an eternal confusion about whose face goes on the hoardings announcing Mary Kom’s boxing events.

]]>http://bollyspice.com/90157/priyanka-chopra-ben-kingsley-subhash-k-jha-reviews-mary-kom/feed0Dapper Caper- Subash K Jha Reviews Raja Natwarlalhttp://bollyspice.com/89818/dapper-caper-subash-k-jha-reviews-raja-natwarlal
http://bollyspice.com/89818/dapper-caper-subash-k-jha-reviews-raja-natwarlal#commentsSat, 30 Aug 2014 04:43:40 +0000http://bollyspice.com/?p=89818“Tu apna kiss karta reh,” Paresh Rawal sarcastically scoffs at the ‘serial kisser’ Emraan Hashmi after he catches him necking with Pakistani bombshell Humaima in a lift in Cape Town. These inhouse jokes, I tell you! They are the life and death of a certain kind of cinema where the script has to be far […]

]]>“Tu apna kiss karta reh,” Paresh Rawal sarcastically scoffs at the ‘serial kisser’ Emraan Hashmi after he catches him necking with Pakistani bombshell Humaima in a lift in Cape Town.

These inhouse jokes, I tell you! They are the life and death of a certain kind of cinema where the script has to be far cleverer than the audience. In Raja Natwarlal,a con caper with a lot going for it at least on paper, Hashmi has little to do that could catapult him to the next level of his career. He swings along in the low tide of this film’s too-clever-for-its-own-good plot, happy to play the “lovable” (giggle!) con-man who chances on a scam much bigger than he had bargained for.

The film is essentially a cat-and-mouse chase between Hashmi’s Natwarlal accompanied by a wry rogue named Yogi(Paresh rawal, giving a terrific shape to his ill-defined role) and a business tycoon in Cape Town named Vardha(K K Menon) whose passion for cricket makes him a sitting duck for a cricket scam masterminded by the aforementioned con persons who , like the script, is not half as clever as he’s like to believe.Hence entire banks and automobiles are sham-constructed within hours to dupe the kingpin villain.

Watching Menon fall into the facile boobytraps laid down by Hashmi,Rawal and their accomplices we soon know why a fool and his money are parted before we can say ‘Subrato Roy’.

Like a woman during her time of the month, the script here has its good and bad moments.While the basic premise of getting the better of a powerful adversary works, some of the individual components in the plot such as the pre-climactic set-up where K K Menon’s character is properly had, makes us wonder how a man who has accumulated billions can be so dumb.

Love does it to a lot of smart people. Here it is cricket. Director Kunal Deshmukh had earlier described the complex affinity between cricket and avarice in Jannat. To its credit it must be said that Raja Natwarlal is a far more tightly-wound and original idea that flounders only when the characters try to act smarter than the script allows them to.

The narrative never slumps in its interest-level, though a lot of times the material doesn’t permit the characters to rise above the limitations imposed on the material by the caper genre. Every character must perforce wear many masks . Nothing is what it seems. Everyone has a wink and smirk hidden under the sleep surface.And every character is finally in it for money.

You may not be convinced by some of the more steep twists and turns in the plot. But the actors go a long way in concealing the inconsistencies in the storytelling. While Paresh Rawal, K K Menon and Deepak Tijori(in an endearing cameo) add to the dapper caper’s watchability-level engaging actors like Mohammed Zeeshan Ayub(as a meandering assassin) and Sumeet Nijawan(the latter brilliant as a corrupt cop) are wasted in underwritten parts. Humaima Mallick wears outrageously low-cut ghagras in her dance-bar numbers , with expressions to match.Is this really the actress who wowed us in Shaoib Masoor’s Bol?

Sassy and slick, Raja Natwarwal is a con caper done up in playful shades and mischievous flavour. It’s enjoyable while it lasts. But you don’t come away with anything besides the feeling that the material should have carried for heft. If only everyone was not busy being someone they are not.

]]>http://bollyspice.com/89818/dapper-caper-subash-k-jha-reviews-raja-natwarlal/feed0“Mardaani is a film that makes all the correct noises about child trafficking.” – Subhash K Jha’s movie reviewhttp://bollyspice.com/89607/mardaani-film-makes-correct-noises-child-trafficking-subhash-k-jhas-movie-review
http://bollyspice.com/89607/mardaani-film-makes-correct-noises-child-trafficking-subhash-k-jhas-movie-review#commentsMon, 25 Aug 2014 06:23:10 +0000http://bollyspice.com/?p=89607Starring Rani Mukherjee, Tahir Bhasin, Jisshu Sengupta, Anil George Directed by Pradeep Sarkar A stellar cast only adds to this accomplished film’s sense of creative propriety. Mardaani is a film that makes all the correct noises about child trafficking. And by “correct noises” I do mean the soundtrack which is among the most evocative provocative […]

A stellar cast only adds to this accomplished film’s sense of creative propriety.

Mardaani is a film that makes all the correct noises about child trafficking. And by “correct noises” I do mean the soundtrack which is among the most evocative provocative and satisfying in recent times.

Normally in Bollywood, when films are done with live sound the effect is scratchy and at times in inaudible. Mardaani cleans out the noises and yet retains a high decibel of authenticity in the complementary relationship between sight and sound.This is a film knows its job.

This, then, is the world of Pradeep Sarkar’s derelict people. Posh pimps and “cool” flesh traders…gnawing at the fabric of our society by playing with the lives of the most innocent and vulnerable. Without the least fuss, director Pradeep Sarkar (so eloquent in his last filmic outing with Rani Mukherjee in Laaga Chunri Mein Daag) provides us vivid glimpses into the life of the cop-hero Shivani (Rani Mukherjee).

Rani’s Shivani is a mixture of the feminine and the mardaani. Displaying exemplary economy of expression the narrative puts forward Shivani’s very articulate attitude to home and profession through brief but lucid encounters with various characters. Towards the end the film’s elegant pace slackens and sags and almost collapses. But somehow, Sarkar manages to keep the proceedings from getting dragged down by the drama, no matter how unruly they progressively gets.

The narrative is well-stocked with signs of conscientiousness. Human trafficking is evidently not a pretext to assemble a thriller here. Rather, it’s the other way around. Out of the vast expanses of the film’s sensitivities there emerges a very engaging thriller, replete with sincere efforts to demonstrate the harsh reality of child prostitution into a cinematic currency.

Shockingly the film’s world of flesh trade is controlled by a cool urbane corporate type of dude named Walt (excellently played by the almost-new actor Tahir Raj Bhasin). Walt operates his prostitution racket with the blue-toothed precision of a corporate enterprise. He is on his play-station in his free time and lives in a Delhi flat with his evil mom (Mona Ambegaonkar, scarily coquettish). It’s all stunningly normal and urbane.

The film’s biggest triumph lies in showing the murk that resides under gleaming surfaces. Girl children are sold for sexual gratification to men old enough to be their grandparents while the piped music plays soothingly in the background. There is a kind of unassuming veracity in the narration that quickly sucks you in. We are inescapably drawn in to Shivani’s dark and desperate mission.

You can’t come away unaffected by the brutal world that Shivani cracks after a girl she loves goes missing. The cat-and-mouse game between the cop-heroine and ‘Walt’ is defined by some excellent dialogues. The words which colonize Pradeep Sarkar’s world are constantly more weighty than the casual tones suggest.

Mardaani lays open a world of crime and heartbreak. Scenes of unimaginable torture and humiliation meted out to young girls are placed against the screen heroics of a heroine who is neither Chulbul Pandey nor Singham and in many ways gutsier than both.

Rani Mukherjee brings in a very level of credibility to the character. Her action scenes are never larger than life. She is not a showoffy cop. And that’s a blessing. Mardaani is film that is carpeted with competent actors. Almost every character, big or small, is played by actors who don’t believe their performances need to scream their skills.

This film believes in what it has to say about the killing of innocence.

“Ravaging the opposition and young girls come easily to me,” leers a politicians.

“Food is memory,” says the doll-like vision of a woman named Charlotte le Bon to our young hero Hasaan, played with a striking sensitivity by the little-known Manish Dayal (where were you hiding, young man?)

If food is indeed memory then this film about food, love, loyalty and ambition would serve us well in the years to come.

I would certainly count The Hundred-Foot Journey among the most visually and emotionally rich films I’ve seen in recent times. Dwelling on the compelling culture of culinary confrontation this finely written and robustly performed film immediately transports us into a world where the taste buds simmer in provocative possibilities opened up in the kitchen and transported to a world beyond the physical.

Director Lasse Hallstrom (The Cider House Rules, Chocolat) excels in creating drama in quaint picture-postcard locales. The Hundred-Foot Journey is shot like a hypnotic dream. Every frame is done up in the tingling palate of a chef d’oeuvre, replete with the spicy aroma of Indian curries wafting in from across the street with insistent invidiousness.

That, in a nutshell, is the mood of the film. You can’t escape the scents and aromas of the kitchen as two restaurateurs, so unlike each other they are bound to bond, declare war in the food space.

And yet, in describing the film through aggressive imagery, I do it grave disservice. The Hundred-Foot Journey is soft supple sensuous stroll through a world created in vivid colours. The narrative, as it makes us familiar with the world of Om Puri’s family and Helen Mirren’s loneliness and defiance from across the street, is a reposeful and resourceful repertoire of handsomely packaged scenes, each meant to provide and revel in a visual and emotional resplendence.

The film opens in Mumbai where Om Puri’s Muslim family loses much in a riot. The theme of displacement hovers darkly at the edges of this beautifully laid-out feast of food and romance, never colouring the bright shades that run through the narrative in cascading pleasurable motions.

Helming the narrative, holding together the family’s fortunes and to a large extent the destiny of this epic culinary pilgrimage, is Om Puri. No stranger to playing Muslim patriarchs in foreign lands Om’s Hassan Kadam in this film is far more fun-loving, romantic and playful than the stern bigoted father in My Son The Fanatic. This is Om’s warmest performance in years. He imbues his character of the chef trying to keep his family and family business together, with rare warmth as he surrenders to its inner life.

Helen Mirren as the snooty rival in the food business is nearly flawless. However her moral reformation is a little too sudden and mawkish. She is far more engaging in the earlier parts of the film when she is wickedly competitive.

The film, in fact, gets darker and richer with every episode. Towards the end we get an extremely clever twist to young Hassan’s culinary aspirations which are removed so far away from their roots that the art of cooking is transformed into a science. Hassan’s aspirational climb from a French village to Paris is done in a hurried pace.

There is a wonderfully warm moment of shared camaraderie over a home-cooked Indian meal in Paris where Manish Dayal’s performance peaks and brims over with enormous wisdom. Here’s an artiste who knows the true art of cooking and acting is in holding back rather than giving all. Dayal is the prized Indian find from abroad. His expressive eyes lend a haunting mischief to his chef’s character. He is solemn yet frivolous.

Dayal’s romance with the doll-like Charlotte le Bon is the stuff fairytales are made of .And the strain that creeps into the romance between these two very goodlooking people is just so uncalled for, you wonder if the script was looking for reasons to force unhappiness into the lovers’ idyllic world.

Don’t look for blemishes in the immaculate frames of this film. An intangible inner and outward beauty defines the landscape of The Hundred-Foot Journey. Seldom in recent times has a film looked and felt so harmonious in form and content. Honeyed and yet hefty this is a cross-cultural love story which looks as good as it feels.

Here is a film that is not apologetic about its obsession with aesthetics. If in cooking presentation is paramount then so be it in movie-making too.

The canine-hero’s name in the list of actors in the credit titles comes first because that’s how Akshay Kumar wants it.

This film tells you to love animals. It’s a simple straightforward premise structured around a comical plot about a gold-digger wastrel whose father leaves his billions to his dog.

Canine apni mutthi mein!

Playing the predatory retriever with an evil glint in his eye and wicked smirk on his face Akshay Kumar has a ball in the film. He does a wickedly amiable mean act trying to poison, electrocute and drown the canine. Admittedly the characters on screen seem to enjoy themselves more than the audience.

Not that we don’t share their enjoyment.

For a large part of the narration Entertainment is fun to watch. The script is deftly and devilishly put together. If only writer-turned-co-director Sajid-Farhad did not trip over the cascade of word-play, the going would have been much more pleasing. Lamentably every character speaks in a tumble of puns and word play, some of them painfully plodding and selfconscious.

The character played by the comically vibrant Krushna Abhishek crams in actors’ names in every sentence. This would have been infuriatingly obtrusive in a film of a more serious nature. No such calamity befalls Entertainment.

The biggest USP of the reasonably entertaining Entertainment is that it never makes the mistake of taking itself too seriously. In the hilarious opening where in a product-endorsement spoof with Riteish Deshmukh, Akshay establishes his character as a rogue and a charlatan the film hops skips and jumps through hilarious hoopla, sometime generating a reluctant laughter in the audience, at other times leaving you a little numbed by the fatuous flavour of the farce.

In one sequence where the leading lady Tamannah’s father Mithun Chakraborty (singularly unfunny) advises his daughter to marry the dog since husbands become “dogs” after marriage anyway, one is not sure if the co-directors aim to be kinky or comical.

Some scenes walk on thick ice, quite literally. The moral turning-point for Akshay’s character vis-à-vis the canine happens in a scene spread out on a dangerously thin ice-bed. It defines what the film tries to achieve given its flimsy premise and nebulous moral ground.

Holding the film from falling apart is Akshay Kumar. Sporting and sometimes sparkling with his comic timing he helps the audience to over over the serious silliness of some of the material in the second-half where, in a style of cat-and-mouse game of Home Alone and Dunston Checks In Akshay gets even with two bumbling comic villains played with anarchic gusto by Prakash Raj and Sonu Sood.

Here is where the narration needed to exercise more temperance. Here is where Entertainment errs. It doles out too much of the farcical garnish that tends to tarnish the innocence of the relationship between Dog and Man.

A blend of the mischievous and the mirthful Entertainment is a green-lit blues-chaser which tends to get carried away with its fun of mood. The gags flow non-stop, accommodating a hefty amount of playing-time to letting the characters grow into precocious over-grown brats.

In one sequence when Akshay Kumar gets to know his father’s billions have gone to the dog, he rolls on the floor and wails like a baby.

Dare any other A-lister actor do that. Entertainment takes on the tripe that our cinema enjoys dishing out and turns it into some kind of a queasy crap-convention that knows it is making little sense most of the time and is not apologetic about its lowbrow aspirations.

And yes, most of Akshay Kumar’s chemistry is with his canine co-star, an imperturbable retriever who seems resigned to being thrown in the middle of a plot which he cannot make sense of.

]]>http://bollyspice.com/88287/woof-yeh-mohabbat-subhash-k-jha-reviews-akshay-kumars-entertainment/feed0Fugly Movie Review: “At Last, A Film With A Social Conscience” – Subhash K Jhahttp://bollyspice.com/83886/last-film-social-conscience-subhash-k-jha-fugly-review
http://bollyspice.com/83886/last-film-social-conscience-subhash-k-jha-fugly-review#commentsSat, 14 Jun 2014 04:31:29 +0000http://bollyspice.com/?p=83886Fugly Starring Jimmy Sheirgil, Mohit Marwah, Kiara Advani, Vijendra Singh, Arfi Lamba Directed by Kabir Sadanand Rating: **** Let’s first get the picture right. Contrary to what the trailers and promotional images tell, Fugly is not a Fukrey-friendly flick about four friends having a ball in life. This film means business. Light on top and […]

Let’s first get the picture right. Contrary to what the trailers and promotional images tell, Fugly is not a Fukrey-friendly flick about four friends having a ball in life. This film means business. Light on top and substantial underneath, this is the Rang De Basanti of the post-Modi era. Thoughtful and at times brilliant, it tells us a great deal about the state of a culture and people searching for reasons to keep the spirit of nationalism alive as self-serving corruption grows all around us.

“There has to be a reason why one feels like dying for this godforsaken country of ours,” one of the four protagonists wonders aloud, as one of them virtually martyrs himself in protest against the the highhandedness of a cop who has been ruthlessly hounding and blackmailing the four protagonists.

Haan Bhai, kuch toh hai. There is something about Hindustan that keeps our spirit alive even when as all considerations of ethics and morality die an unnatural death all around us.

Fugly is the cinema of social awakening. It tackles issues such as gay prostitution, khaki-clad fascism, and the excess of television journalism, perhaps cramming in too many social issues in order to make the subject relevant and resonant. And yet nowhere does the director seem to bite into more than he can chew.

In one of the many striking sequences that coil themselves around the four young lives with impetuous intensity, we see random images of people on the city streets misbehaving mostly with women. I don’t know how much of these visuals of an ill-behaved nation is candid. Milind Jog’s camera seems to move concernedly through the streets of Delhi and Gurgaon in search of answers for the moral bankruptcy that brought Modi into power last month.

This then, is the portrait of a nation grappling with damnation as seen through the eyes of four impetuous youngsters. The actors get it right from the word go. Right away, let’s applaud the director for giving us four bright newcomers, two of whom are natural-born stars. Unlike Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra where one of the quartet of “young” people living through the culture of disenchantment was played by a 40-plus actor, Kabir Sadanand’s four protagonists are confidently equipped, both physically and emotionally, to make that journey along with their characters from careless pleasure to self-destructive conscientiousness.

I came away with many memorable scenes in the film. One in particular where Devi (Kiara Advani)’s three male friends try to wash the abusive “bitch” off her residential door was deeply moving.

If only we could wipe out the hurt that a bigoted social structure permits the bullying sections to cause!

Sadanand accompanies the quartet of protagonists’ journey with wallops of whimsy and irony. He could have avoided making light of the situation when there is no room for levity in the narration. The film frequently suffers from mood swings. One minute we see the protagonists trapped in an eerie cat-and-mouse game with the diabolic cop Chautala (Jimmy Sheirgil, suitably sinister and characteristically outstanding). The next minute we see Vijender Singh’s character of a pampered and arrogant son of a Haryanvi politician doing a comic cat-and-mouse skit with income tax officers who have come to raid his father’s premises.

Erratic and over-emphatic at times, what works for the narrative is its supremely active heart and soul. That the film and its makers genuinely care for the adrift youth and their aspirational bankruptcy comes out in spurts of brilliancy. The large chunk of the film when Devi (Kiara) gets sexually humiliated by the neighbourhood grocer (a gross contemporary version of what Kanhaiyalal played in Mother India) and her friends’ outrage leading to unforeseen and catastrophic tragedy, is exceptionally even in tone and sure-handed in execution.

But then, various debauched politicians and corruptible elements show up to mess up our protagonists’ lives. And with them comes irrelevant diversions like an item performed by Sana Saeed who had played Shah Rukh Khan’s little daughter in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. As she writhes her booty inviting sundry lechers to partake of the pleasures I wondered if the impact of the film’s message of dignity as a birthright for girls and women is not been suicidally blunted by commodifying women for item songs while expressing outrage over their objectification in the rest of the film. Elsewhere in another unwarranted song break we have Vijender Singh telling us he is ‘Good In Bed’.

Oh, really?

Such moral contradictions are quite unnecessary in a film where everyone, most of all the director, knows his or her job. Everyone including the bit-actor Rajveer Ahuja who plays Jimmy Sheigil’s subordinate and Praveen Singh Sisodia as the lecherous grocer, is effective and potent. So is the film, if you ask me. Sadanand keeps the proceedings believable and aesthetic .

The ending will shock and move audiences.

Two of the actors Mohit Marwah and Kiara Advani are star material. Their on screen relationship remains undefined, unpunctuated by the mandatory item song.

Routinely, we love to sweep the truth about Hindu-Muslim relations under the carpet. Or simply sugar-coat it to make the actual volume of mutual distrust and animosity palatable to a nation steeped in escapism and self-delusion.

Dekh Tamasha Dekh(DTD) directed by theatre legend Feroz Abbas Khan (of Tumhari Amrita fame) is a jolting wake-up call for a nation swept into a slumberous silence by the status quo. Put simply, we don’t want to face the reality about the friction that simmers just under the surface among the two communities. DTD is perhaps the first Hindi film which ventures into the vista of vitriolic without the fear of offending the more refined sections of the audience who may not be comfortable watching the vanguards and trouble-makers of the two communities addressing each other with the harshest of epithets.

This is not a film about niceties. Director Feroz Khan who comes to us with a formidable theatre background doesn’t allow the narrative to nibble daintily at corrosive socio-political matters. Rather, the narrative chews industriously on the political issues. By using the twin missiles of satire and irony Khan brings into a play a kind of pinned-down provocativeness into the plot whereby the characters become real and representational at the same time.

Miraculously the film is both a parable and a topical comment on communal relations. This is a film that takes burning headlines and converts them into slices of incriminating illustration on Man and the beast within.The smell of authenticity pervades the destiny of the political-driven nefariously motivated characters.

This is literary cinema. The characters and their situations unfold like chapters from an epic novel. This is Govind Nihalani’s Tamas without the recognizable punctuation marks. The director authors the characters’ destiny in scenes that are written like chapters. Amazingly, the context of the scenes are explained to the audience without the crutches of a voice-over. Take that lengthy but hilarious sequence where the newspaper editor Mutha Seth (Satish Kaushik, slimy and Machiavellian as can be) summons the newspaper editor and treats him like a pet dog – literally barking orders to both the canine and the editor at the same time. Elsewhere a wife and mother (Tanvi Azmi, eloquence personified) grieves for her dead husband while women of the neighbourhood join in to while away their time while waiting for the taps to supply water.

The cauldron of simmering ideas on the polemics of discontent is brought to boiling point in the narrative. As danga-phasaad (riots) become a nanga (naked) façade of organized miscreancy, the director steps back to let the characters assume a life of their own.What we see is an unadorned dance of demoniacal self-gratification mottled by sudden spates of innocence and grace.

A mother-daughter sequence towards the end featuring the lyrical Tanvi Azmi and her screen-daughter (Apoorva Arora) reminds us that political cinema need not be dry and emotion-less. As the characters shed their humanism the plot gathers a sense of tragic redemption that we sense waiting around the corner.

It’s the kingdom of the quirky and the tragic. Feroz Khan portrays a world that is both bizarre and poignant. Groups of militant religious fundamentalists clash over a corpse using the vilest of insults to strike one another’s ideological arguments down. A police thana (station) goes in a tizzy as their resident bitch has been impregnated by a street dog. A rabid mullah (Sudhir Pandey, giving a slyly cunning performance) denounces soft-liners and urges ‘true’ Muslims to fob off the danger to their religion. An intellectual author sits literally deafened (his hearing aid off his eardrums) as rioters shed blood right at his doorstep. A moderate Muslim journalist gets shooed out of town by sneering rioting hardliners who then burn down his house. A rational non-partisan cop (Vinay Jain) musters courage to stop communal mayhem in town. A young innocent Hindu-Muslim couple tries desperately to cling to their precious little paradise as everything around them goes up in flames. A mother grieves for a son who has fled from the scene of communal violence….

Images of violence and retribution coalesce in Feroz Khan’s world replete with stark visuals of the town-people bickering bitterly over a non-issue that’s been blown out of all proportions by trouble makers.

DTD is a work of many contradictory forces pulling and tugging at the plot as it stretches out in a saga of valour and vitality, caprice and cowardice. Remarkably, the narrative makes no use of extraneous artificial sounds to create a heightened drama. The natural sounds that pervade the soundtrack add to an eerie sense of a world of fearsome anxieties. Indeed sound designer Baylon Fonseca is one of the heroes of this film. Sreekar Prasad edits the material to retain the rawness of mood without sacrificing the smoothness of narration. Hemant Chaturvedi’s cinematography sweeps across the town prowling to peep into homes and hearts that are aflame with an anxious identity crisis.

Rarely does cinema take us so deep into the socio-political dynamics of communal disharmony. Honest to the core, brutal, ironical and disturbing, Feroz Abbas Khan’s world of Hindu-Muslim strife is cluttered with a compelling tension that erupts into welters of well-aimed social comment. What we come away with is a film committed to mirroring the murk and mirth of organized religion and a disorganized system of governance which plays a game of appeasement with religious communities, setting off one group of people against another.

In this scenario of impending catastrophe a cop suddenly discovers unplumbed depths of heroism and tells the flag-waving saffron and green brigades to back off. There is just that little space where we pause for applause. Stark, real,disturbing, ironical, funny and gripping Dekh Tamasha Dekh is the film Govind Nihalani would have made if only he had the freedom to call a spade a spade. Not all the truth of Feroz Khan’s cinema is palatable or even fully intelligible. But there is little here that doesn’t provide food for thought.

This is a film that addresses itself to ideas and thoughts buried away from human consideration. We don’t want to consider to what depth human nature can fall if pushed against a dirty wall. To record the dirt on the wall and the blood on the floor with such clarity and honesty is not within the creative powers of every filmmaker.

Feroz Khan comes from theatre. He knows the voices of the actors must be heard in the last rows.

This is an important treatise of our times. It should not be missed by any Indian.

Sometimes, love just ain’t enough. So there we have two people in love. The pampered but not spoilt bureaucrat’s daughter Mayera and her lover beau Mohit whose upward mobility is frozen by an employment meltdown in his airline organization(spicy allusion to the Kingfisher crisis, yes?).

It’s Delhi’s noveau riche Gurgaon world bathed in cosmetic conceit.Sonam Kapoor and Ayushmann Khurrana blend into this gleaming kingdom’s excesses effortlessly. The two of them are so good as a couple, imagining them apart for even a portion of the bitterness that bites into the narrative during the second-half becomes unbearable.

Debutant director Nupur Asthana’s is a bright scrambled world of wealth luxury and the yuppy club’s unstated desperation to move up the corporate ladder. It is also by its very definition a ridiculously self-important delusional world.

Miraculously this film with its gleaming polished surfaces neither gasps nor laughs at the ignobility of upward mobility.

There is an interestingly crafted fight scene between the film’s lead pair where Mayera reminds Mohit that she has not bought a new pair of shoes during the last two months because of his job loss. That she doesn’t realize how ridiculous she sounds to Mohit is a measure of the underlining irony that the narrative scrapes out of these characters while portraying the exacerbated materialism of the go-getting generation.

Habib Faisal’s writing is smart and amiable crowded with quaint colloquialisms culled from the Capital’s youngster’s language. The writing also surprises itself by becoming inwardly-drawn and introspective at the most unexpected moments. That the screenplay has got Ayushmann Khurrana to play the cool guy whose perfectly laid-out plans fall apart ,is a stroke of luck for this likeable film.

Khurrana looks like the guy next-door who wouldn’t mind pulling a few strings to float higher than the level allotted to him by fate. He brings a suave arrogance to his role and creates a cohesive graph for his character .He is an actor to watch.

Of course it helps Khurrana that he has Rishi Kapoor to play his girlfriend’s hawk-like father. Rishi’s character of the IAS officer on the verge of retirement(with a companion from his work place who typically, offers his “humble” advice on every matter) is brilliantly written.Rishi’s Sehgal is a pompous name-thrower with an inflated sense of self-worth, over-possessive about his only daughter’s life and preferences, Rishi’s V K Sehgal is a striking image of a man on the verge of erupting into a self-deprecatory laughter, if he only he knew how funny his quirks look from the outside.

Rishi brings to the characters a cornocupia of ‘cool’. Seldom in his any other recent film except Do Dooni Chaar has this brilliant actor expressed such pleasure in putting forward his character’s point of view.It’s no coincidence that film too was written by Faisal.

So many of Rishi Kapoor’s scenes with Khurrana stand tall because of the way the two characters meet as adversaries who fortunately love the same girl in different ways. Sonam as the girl torn between an autocratic dad and unreasonable lover is so in-character you wonder whether the role and its fetish for designer labels were written specially for Sonam.

Bewakoofiyan has nothing new to say. And that is its greatest virtue. It is Meet The Parents where the father and the prospective son-in-law’s roles are better played than the original. Yes, Kapoor and Khurrana are better than Robert de Niro and Ben Stiller were in the Hollywood film about the father of the bride.

The narrative sparkles with a mischievous elegance. The winking homage to the go-getting glam-set of Delhi works mainly because the three protagonists are so immersed in the goings-on they make us forget that we’ve seen most of these conflicts over and over again in the past.In terms of the fluency with which the cliché about the love birds and the girl’s disapproving dad is tackled , Bewakoofiyaan is a marked improvement on Yashraj production’s last two pretentious hammy films Shudh Desi Romance and Gunday.

Ayushmann’s performance is oh not so hammy. A pure delight to behold after Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor’s over-energized bravado in Gunday.

]]>http://bollyspice.com/77046/subhash-k-jha-bewakoofiyaan-frothy-fun-thought-provoking/feed0No One Can Touch This, Bhansali’s Genius Explodes On Screen – Subhash K Jha on Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram Leelahttp://bollyspice.com/71126/one-can-touch-bhansalis-genius-explodes-screen-subhash-k-jha-goliyon-ki-raasleela-ram-leela
http://bollyspice.com/71126/one-can-touch-bhansalis-genius-explodes-screen-subhash-k-jha-goliyon-ki-raasleela-ram-leela#commentsSat, 16 Nov 2013 08:08:02 +0000http://bollyspice.com/?p=71126Starring Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh Directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali Just when you think you have seen it all, there comes a film that reminds you of how far the cinematic medium has come…And how far it can go in the right hands. And let’s face it. Bhansali is Bhansali. His visual imagery in all […]

Just when you think you have seen it all, there comes a film that reminds you of how far the cinematic medium has come…And how far it can go in the right hands. And let’s face it. Bhansali is Bhansali. His visual imagery in all his earlier films from Khamoshi: The Musical to Guzaarish is comparable with the best art from any field of aesthetics.

You could say Bhansali’s cinema is the visual equivalent of Lata Mangeshkar’s singing. And you wouldn’t be wrong.

In terms of its free-flowing unmeasured operatic opulence Ram-Leela (with or without the censorial pre-fix) comes closest to the giddy high-pitched and yet miraculously controlled tempo and tenor of Bhansali’s Devdas. That too was a steeply sensuous cinematic adaptation from a literary source. Ram Leela goes to Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet and comes away with a marvel of a tale of love-at-first-sight. Bhansali tilts his hat to mythology, folklore and the culture of community clashes with a blend of spontaneity and brilliance that comes naturally to only this filmmaker, and no one else.

Bhansali’s visuals remain as stunning and poetic as they were when he made his directorial debut. What he does to Shakespeare’s tumultuous saga of sudden love between scions of two warring families is beyond the imagination of all other living filmmakers of this country. The rigorous reworking of the Shakespearean classic required a certain sense of recklessness. Earlier this year we saw some of the same creative recklessness in two other Bollywood adaptations of Romeo & Juliet, namely Aanand Rai’s Raanjhanaa and Manish Tiwary’s Issaq.

But Bhansali is Bhansali…Every image, every frame tells a story. Every shot in this brilliant film has a place in his cosmos. You won’t be left wondering for even a split second why you saw what you just did.

It’s all a part of a grand design. And yet so overflowing with an unrehearsed warmth and vivacity, so brimming with spontaneous joie de vivre (exhilaration), and celebration, you wonder if Shakespeare’s play was written for this day when Bhansali’s deconstruction of the material would give to us characters who are many many sizes larger than life.

Yup, size matters. And in the case of Ram-Leela you can say that with a wink. Bhansali’s Romeo and Juliet are unabashedly sexual in the body and verbal language. None of that traditional coyness and hesitation that characterizes traditional courtship when Ram and Leela discuss one another’s vital statistics. He runs a porn video parlour. She comes from a family of gun-wielding criminals helmed by a steely matriarch (Supriya Pathak, brilliant). He comments on her ‘136 inch’ chest, she talks about his,er, trigger. They are in love and they know lust is an integral component of their relationship.

No two lovers derived from a classic romance have celebrated their mutual sexual desires so frankly and fearlessly.

Gosh, these two are Romeo and Juliet on steroids! And this is as good a place as any to tell you that no other two actors could have done to Bhansali’s Romeo/Ram and Juliet-Leela what Ranveer and Deepika have done. They don’t play the two characters. The couple owns their characters. From the moment he spots her at a Holi bash, unholy thoughts begin to cross randy Ram’s mind. Ranveer plays Ram as a horny son-of-a-gun….and you can take that literally since there are more gun’s in Bhansali’s colorful Gujarati town than there were in Anurag Kashyap’s Wasseypur.

As for Deepika Padukone…if Shakespeare was alive (and in many ways this film does bring him back to life) he would have penned a full-blooded sonnet on Deepika’s beauty and grace. When she expresses anger she is molten lava and when she dances she is the epitome of feline grace. If 2013 is the year of the bewilderingly beautiful Padukone then Ram-Leela is her piece de resistance, and one that impels a standing ovation for the actress and her director. Yup, she can show this one to her grandchildren with pride of ownership.

So much has been said about Bhansali’s visual sense. But not enough. The way he composes the shots to convey the passionate desperation of lovers who know they’re running out of time is a subject that textbooks can be written about. With a magician’s dexterity Bhansali weaves the characters into frames with seamless splendor magically making space for the passionate and the tender.

In his quest for the most visually invigorating shots the director is here assisted amply by his cinematographer Ravi Varman. Varman, let me state, uses the camera like Ustad Amjad Ali Khan uses the Sarod. It’s an instrument to converse with divinity. Wasiq Khan’s art work too unfurls a spiralling tapestry of kaleidoscopic colours that find a place in the hectic frames without jostling or crowding the canvas.

Of the innumerable imperishable images that emerge from Ram-Leela’s tumultuous tale of overnight passion , elopement, estrangement and reunion, I’d single out two. The first shows Barkha Bisht as Ranveer’s widowed sister-in-law running away from a gang of attackers. As she runs through the rugged hinterland her brass vessel tumbles down-slope with her.

The sequence, caught in a desperately dying light, is probably the most vivid image of impending doom I’ve seen in any recent film.

The other unforgettable image features Deepika, her hand bloodied after an injury, lying on the wet ground in a streak of blood. It reminded me of Aishwarya Rai’s slashed wrist creating a pond of blood with her hand in Bhansali’s Hum…Dil De Chuke Sanam.

Fire and blood are never far away from Bhansali’s vision. Though there is plenty of bloodied images in Ram-Leela, the fire this time rages in the eyes of the characters.

Ram-Leela’s visual poetry is so eloquent you wonder at times if the filmmaker is a closet-painter. A closet-musician, Bhansali certainly is. His self-composed songs assisted my Monty Sharma’s evocative background score perfectly capture the film’s impetuous mood .

The actors do the rest. Every performer surrenders to the tempestuous saga. While Supriya Pathak leads the supporting cast with a stellar performance, Richa Chadha, Abhimanyu Singh, Gulshan Devaiah and Sharad Kelkar are the portrait of pitch-perfect emoting.

Really, you’ve never seen anything quite like this before. Exhilarating, tumultuous, passionate, flamboyant, fluent and quite simply fabulous…Sanjay Bhansali’s Gujju take on Romeo & Juliet would have surely made Shakespeare giddy with joy. Brimming with exuberance and energy Ram-Leela’s exalted aesthetics and powerhouse narration once again prove Bhansali to be an incomparable storyteller. As for the Ranveer-Deepika pair, I finally know what on-screen chemistry means. Their frankly erotic togetherness is comparable with Raj Kapoor and Nargis in Awara.

Are they really in love? Who cares! Their on-screen collaboration would far outdistance anything that they would share together or apart in real life.

Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram Leela (phew!) is the most vital romantic musical in the last five years. To experience it is to serenade the divine. To miss it would be a crime.

]]>http://bollyspice.com/71126/one-can-touch-bhansalis-genius-explodes-screen-subhash-k-jha-goliyon-ki-raasleela-ram-leela/feed0FRAMING MOVIES Special Edition: Twenty-Eight: Amar Prem (1972)http://bollyspice.com/70217/framing-movies-special-edition-twenty-eight-amar-prem-1972
http://bollyspice.com/70217/framing-movies-special-edition-twenty-eight-amar-prem-1972#commentsWed, 30 Oct 2013 09:23:10 +0000http://bollyspice.com/?p=70217From its opening montage of a young rustic girl watching her callous husband bring home another wife, to the dying moments when the woman, now in her twilight years, is taken away to the relative comfort of her foster-son’s home as the festivities of Durga Puja break out on the streets of Kolkata… Amar Prem […]

]]>From its opening montage of a young rustic girl watching her callous husband bring home another wife, to the dying moments when the woman, now in her twilight years, is taken away to the relative comfort of her foster-son’s home as the festivities of Durga Puja break out on the streets of Kolkata… Amar Prem is a glorious homage to that favourite Bollywood archetype: the golden-hearted prostitute.

That Sharmila Tagore plays the woman whom men of all ages gravitate to in pursuit of some heavy duty nurturing is a very happy situation for the screenplay. In the film a 7-year old boy and a 30-plus man both desire the same kind of emotional attention from her.This prostitute is not about sex. She is about soul. Sharmila brings to this timeless adaptation of Bibhutibushan Bandhopaddhyay’s story, a kind of simpering beauty that levitates the lyricism of the tragic but uplifting tale to the level of a supremely seductive saga.

Sharmila’s character, a homeless childless woman who is tricked into a life of prostitution, is not just a mother-figure to the lonely neglected near-divorcee Anand Babu (Rajesh Khanna) she is also the woman the ill-treated neighborhood imp Nandu (Master Bobby who played pivotal roles in a number of films including Ek Phool Do Mali and Amar Prem before disappearing into adulthood) keeps running to for solace and samosas, in spite of being severely punished by his stepmother (Bindu).

In one of the many sequences simmering with seductive synergy Sharmila wonders aloud why Anand Babu insists on coming to her when he has a home and wife.

“Even Nandu has a home and a family. Why does he come to you?” counters Rajesh Khanna, thereby raising an important issue. Indian men of all ages look for their mother in every woman they love. In Amar Prem the oedipal complex is turned on its head…away from the bed. The men in Pushpa’s life want to be mollycoddled.Though she’s a prostitute she is never shown giving sex. Men want something far more basic from her. Pushpa is the Devi Maa reincarnated. So giving, the men forget she’s human after all.

Pushpa’s relationship with Anand Babu is purely platonic. She serves him drinks, provides him a much-needed shoulder to cry on. She is attentive and compassionate but never over-inquisitive. There is only one sequence where she actually asks him about his wife. And even there Anand Babu doesn’t tell her the truth about his marital life.

The truth is, his wife has no time for him.

Shakti Samanta was not just a master storyteller, he took grave risks with the draconian star system. At a time when Rajesh Khanna after the dream launch in Shakti’s Aradhana two years earlier, was the movie monarch the director cast Khanna as the third lead of Amar Prem. The film’s main dramatic and emotional resonance emanates from Pushpa’s unconditional love for the boy Nandu. Anand Babu comes later.

Sportingly Rajesh Khanna creates beautiful space for his character.The mutating paradigms of a life that knows no succour at home spills persuasively out of Khanna’s portrayal. He is a man who claims to hate tears and cries in tearless grief for love.

Perhaps sensing the superstar’s secondary status in the story Shakti Samanta gave Rajesh Khanna three memorable Kishore Kumar solos to sing. Each a landmark to this day.

But it’s Sharmila’s stylized but supremely seductive performance that holds the mutating plot together. Her heavy silk sarees, her elaborate hairstyles, the jewellery and quality of innocent coquettishness contribute cogently to making Amar Prem the experience that it is.

There are moments of honey-dipped Pure Cinema carpeting this delicately-threaded tale of a Devi and her two devotees. The sequence shot in red-light area leading up to Lata Mangeshkar’s timeless and pristine ‘Raina beeti jaye’ is a classic study of divine seduction. It has its antecedents in the film Adalat which came 18 years earlier . The sequence of Nargis singing Lataji’s ‘Unko yeh shikayat hai’ in Adalat and Sharmila singing ‘Raina beeti jaye’ in Amar Prem are formatted on the principle of the Divine Woman’s magnetic voice and beauty pulling the tormented man into reading the sleazy ambience of the kotha as a place of worship.

Indeed Amar Prem makes a silently screaming plea in defense of the Fallen Woman. The girls in the brothel mingle and chatter happily as though they’re in a run-down boarding school .

The concept of the anointed whore-goddess has its roots in the way Saratchandra Chatterjee had portrayed Chandramukhi in Devdas. Amar Prem carries the mythical concept forward to a heartbreaking crescendo of deification. No matter where the Fallen Woman, Pushpa is tossed by destiny she manages to raise moral standards around her.

In the most evocative section of her journey from ravaged innocence to pained old age, Pushpa ends up as a maidservant washing vessels in a rundown lodge(a lot of aged prostitutes find themselves reduced to menial jobs at the end of their lives). In a vivid reversal of fortune the husband(Manmohan) who had once driven Pushpa out of his home now lies on his deathbed in a pokey desolate room. She gives him his last drink of water. Then when he dies, like a true traditional Hindu wife she breaks her bangle with a rock in a symbolical gesture of widowhood.

The above sequence would probably seem laughable in the contemporary socio-cultural context where women scarcely wear glass bangles, let alone break them. But think about it. The woman, the wife, the mother and the daughter …every role that a girl is expected to play is subsumed in Sharmila Tagore’s commodious persona without commodifying her. She is at the same time, a full-bodied woman and a divine entity, flesh and flash of eternity…She is Every-woman and yet not quite like anyone else.And when Nandu shows up at the end to take her away, we feel the same surge of relief for her that we feel when a comatose relative finally leaves for the other world.